Joseph Roth: A Search for the Wandering Jew by Dennis Marks - 2011 - 140 pages

 Wandering Jew:  The Search for Joseph Roth by Dennis Marks -2011

Born: September 2, 1894, Brody, Ukraine

Died: May 27, 1939, Paris, France

Spouse: Friederike Reichler (m. 1922–1939)

Partner: Irmgard Keun

His works 

  • The Spider's Web (Das Spinnennetz) (1923, adapted in 1989 into a film of the same name)

• Hotel Savoy (1924)
• The Rebellion (Die Rebellion) (1924; some editions of the English translation call it simply Rebellion)
• "April: The Story of a Love Affair" (April. Die Geschichte einer Liebe) (1925; in The Collected Stories)
• "The Blind Mirror" (Der blinde Spiegel) (1925; in The Collected Stories)
• Flight without End (Die Flucht ohne Ende) (1927)
• Zipper and His Father (Zipper und sein Vater) (1928)
• Right and Left (Rechts und links) (1929)
• The Silent Prophet (Der stumme Prophet) (1929)
• Job (Hiob) (1930)
• Perlefter (novel fragment) (1930)
• Radetzky March (Radetzkymarsch) (1932; some editions of the English translation call it The Radetzky March)
• Fallmerayer the Stationmaster (novella) (Stationschef Fallmerayer) (1933)
• The Antichrist (Der Antichrist) (1934)
• Tarabas (1934)
• "The Bust of the Emperor" (Die Büste des Kaisers) (1934; in The Collected Stories)
• Confession of a Murderer (Beichte eines Mörders) (1936)
• "Die hundert Tage" ("The Ballad of the Hundred Days") (1936)
• Weights and Measures (Das falsche Gewicht) (1937)
• The Emperor's Tomb (Die Kapuzinergruft) (1938)
• The Legend of the Holy Drinker (Die Legende vom heiligen Trinker) (1939)
• The String of Pearls (Die Geschichte von der 1002. Nacht) (1939)[9]
• "The Leviathan" (Der Leviathan) (1940; in The Collected Stories)
• The Collected Stories of Joseph Roth, trans. by Michael Hofmann, New York: W. W. Norton & Company (2003)

 - from Wikipedia 

Marks starts his book by telling us it is not a biography of Joseph Roth, rather it is an attempt to understand his place in Europe between the wars.  It is very far from a panegyric, a subtitle might be “what was Roth trying to mask in his fictions and in his lies to so many people”.  It is also an account of what being a Jew from 

Mitteleuropa, (meaning Middle Europe, is one of the German terms for Central Europe) meant to Roth.  Mittleleuropa, in better days this included much of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was a terrible place to be a Jew during Roth’s life.  He left Austria in just as Hitler took over and moved to Paris.  For years he was the best paid journalist in Europe but he preferred to live in “flea bag” hotels, squandering his income in cheap bars, and prostitutes.  His very rich Friend Stefan Zweig often had to get him out of trouble with never paid back loans.

Marks book is a personal story of his attempt to understand Roth beginning with explaining why Roth would give differing accounts of where he was born and of the social background of his parents.  Marks traveled to the places Roth resided, trying to find traces of his existence.

I have read all of Roth in translation and available as a Kindle,11 novels and the collections of essays available. Roth is as smart they come.  Marks tells us that The Radetzy March is for sure Roth’s masterpiece.  My sentimental favorite is The Hotel Savoy.

Dennis Michael Marks, was head of music at BBC Television in the 1980s and from 1993 to 1997 was general director of English National Opera. He was also a maker of television documentaries, broadcaster and author. Wikipedia

Born: July 2, 1948, Harrow, United Kingdom

Died: April 2, 2015, London, United Kingdom

Movies: Under African Skies: Mali, Fela Kuti: Teacher Don't Teach Me Nonsense

Books: Wandering Jew: The Search for Joseph Roth

Education: The Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School, Trinity College

Nominations: British Academy Television Huw Wheldon Award For The Best Arts Programme or Series, Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Cultural Program

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The Emperor's Tomb by John Roth (1938, 160 pages) His Last Novel

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I am really glad I decided to once again participate in 

German Literature Month November 2013.  I thank Caroline and Lizzy for hosting this great reading event.

So far I have read and posted on these works, all but Kafka are new to me writers. 

The Tin Drum-by Gunther Grass

"The Judgement" by Franz Kafka

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque -very powerful war novel 

"A Letter from an Unknown Woman" by Stefan Zweig. 

The Death of the Adversary by Hans Klein - a work of genius

"The Job Application" by Robert Walser 

Chess Game by Stefan Zweig-I will read much more of his work

"The Battle of Sempach" by Robert Walser

I have also listed to podcasts of "Basta" and "Frau Wilkes" by Robert Walser

The March of Radetsky by Joseph Roth I hope to read all his work

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor von Rezzori amazing work of art.

"Flypaper" by Robert Musil

"Mendel the Bibliophile" by Stefan Zweig - I totally love this story.

"The Dead are Silent" by Arthur Schnitzler an entertaining work from 1907

"There Will Be Action" by Heinrich Boll a very good short story by Nobel Prize Winner

Transit by Anne Seghars 1942 very much worth reading

The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig - an elegy to a lost culture. 1942

Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald. 2001. 

The Emperor's Tomb by Joseph Roth is a sequal to his  The Radetsky March (1932) and should be read only by those who have previously read and enjoyed the first book. I enjoyed them both but I did find The Radetsky March the much better of the two.  The second book is only 160 pages and I do endorse reading both of them in close sequence.  

A. S. Byatt in a very good short article in The Guardian says that this novel is about mothers, wives, and women where the first one was about fathers, grandfathers, uncles, and brothers in arms in the Royal Austrian army and a country dominated by the Emperor Franz Joseph. It is very much about prostitutes and how omni-prescent they were in old Vienna.  There was also a constant fear of disease.  It was a very "macho culture" where dueling scars were a mark of manhood and a distaste for brothels or a concern over illnesses made one suspect in the eyes of your all important fellow officers.   The Emperor's Tomb follows the life of a grand-nephew of a founder of the Nobel Trotta line.

In this novel the central character goes from being a young dandy in Vienna ( a great place to be a well healed young man about town) to being inducted into the military and winding up in Siberia.  In a scene you knew it broke Roth's heart to write, he talks about the day Austria voted to be unified with Germany and the growing proliferation of Nazis Swastikas in his beloved home town.

Ok, not the master work that The Radetsky March is but still it has great scenes, and weak ones, but I am still very glad I read it.  I will next read by Roth The Savoy Hotel, kind of a Grand Hotel type of work.